OTTAWA, Canada — Canada’s privacy commissioner warned a parliamentary committee Tuesday that the sweeping age verification bill promoted by Senator Julie Miville-Dechênel has broad censorship implications and could eventually apply to mainstream services like Netflix. .
Commissioner Philippe Dufresne suggested the scope of the bill should be “dramatically limited” to address concerns about affected content, The Canadian Press reported.
Canada’s Deputy Minister of Heritage, Owen Ripley, also testified, calling the Miville-Dechênel bill “highly problematic for a number of reasons, including a scope that is far too broad, both in terms of regulated services and regulated content.” ”
The Canadian Press reported that University of Ottawa law professor and internet expert Michael Geist called the bill “fundamentally flawed,” explaining that age verification technology “simply isn’t there yet” to achieve what censorship advocates as Miville-Dechênel and her US-based allies and colleagues seek.
An unelected politician with special American allies
As XBIZ reported, Miville-Dechêne – an unelected official since, like most British members of the House of Lords, Canadian senators are appointed – is a former journalist and broadcaster who appears to have no specialized knowledge of universal technical and systemic issues regarding content moderation by third parties on the Internet.
In June 2021, Miville-Dechêne spoke to French-language CBC outlet Radio Canada for an in-depth piece on the religious motivation of the then anti-Pornhub crusade led by MP Arnold Viersen with the support of American anti-porn crusader Laila Mickelwait of the Exodus Cry control.
She told Radio Canada that while she does not share the ideology of Exodus Cry, she tackles the issue of sexual exploitation “from a feminist angle.”
“The issue of children watching porn online and the presence of illegal content on porn sites have brought together a large coalition of Canadian citizens who are ideologically different but who agree on these two precise objectives,” she added.
However, in April 2022, Miville-Dechêne said that “protecting children from pornography is both a health and a public safety issue,” echoing NCOSE and Exodus Cry terminology about an alleged “public health crisis” surrounding porn viewing and about ‘porn addiction’. A concept that has been repeatedly debunked.
“Exposing minors, especially boys, to online pornography is associated with a number of harmful consequences: addiction, aggressive sexual behavior, fear, anxiety and an increase in sexist beliefs that particularly affect girls and women,” she told the committee.
‘Pass it in now, determine the ‘technical details’ later’
During Tuesday’s hearing, Miville-Dechêne and her supporters argued that the bill’s goal “to protect minors from sexually explicit and violent material” is important enough to pass, with the technical details to be settled through a rulemaking process. ” The Canadian press reported this.
Academic expert Geist responded that the bill is “fundamentally flawed in its current form, and cannot be fixed without a complete overhaul,” and that “the technology simply does not exist to enable age verification at scale.”
Ripley added that, as written, “the proposed law would make it a rule for services like Netflix to verify the age of their users,” which would have “far-reaching implications for how Canadians access the internet and using it. Website blocking remains a highly controversial enforcement tool that presents a range of challenges and could impact Canadians’ freedom of expression and Canada’s commitment to an open and free internet and net neutrality.”
Dufresne proposed an amendment that narrowed the bill’s scope to “providing sexually explicit material for commercial purposes.”